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PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a popular method used to encrypt, decrypt and digitally sign email and secure computer files using public key cryptography.
[h=2]History[/h]
[h=2]Key Management[/h]
[h=2]History[/h]
- Philip Zimmermann devised PGP in the 1990s against the wishes of the U.S. government, which thought it violated restrictions on exporting cryptographic programs. He succeeded in making it the primary Internet encryption standard for email, although a different version, PGPi, is mandated for world-wide use without legal restrictions.
- Public key cryptography is an asymmetric scheme that uses a pair of keys for encryption: a public key, which encrypts data, and a corresponding private, or secret, key for decryption. Each person or entity using PGP generates a public/private key pair.
[h=2]Key Management[/h]
- The public keys are managed by various certificate authority entities on the Internet to provide confidence of the ownership of users' public keys. When installing later versions of PGP, a local key management is set up to manage the keys for users of that computer.server
- PGP supports both message authentication, which establishes who or what sent the message, and integrity checking, which detects if the message has been altered by using digital signatures. Certificate authorities provide this verification.